The Great Chain

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Secret Atheist Plot to Ban Religion, Persecute Believers and Eat Children Revealed!!!

Many Theists cleave to an incredibly deranged and dystopian fantasy about Atheists. They seem to not only believe that we intend to prevent them from worshipping and impose some manner of Scientism on them, but that we will then discard all morality, destroy all civil and societal institutions and then drag us all down into a Hobbesian war of all against all.

My only question is how did they find out? And how did they miss the fact that we also like to eat babies.

This conceit is laughable, but it crops up again and again and again. Indeed, one of the strongest alleged defenses in theism's favor is this conceit that without theism, there can be no objective morality. Theologians like William Lane Craig explicitly makes this argument, in a reducto ad absurdum, basically stating that if there is any objective right or wrong, then it must come from God.

The logic behind such a statement is laughable at best because it is only possible to state objective moral truths for and between human beings. Our most BASIC moral truth, one that has been universally and objectively true since LONG before humans even possessed speech is that is wrong to abandon your infants. This moral truth is absolute for humans. Inviolate. This moral truth is not the result of any divine revelation, but an absolute biological necessity. At least for humans. This is because our young are completely and utterly helpless.

Yet hundreds of MILLIONS of species on this planet have no such biological imperative. They always abandon their young to fend for themselves and allow the vast majority to die. It is readily conceivable that the evolution of intelligence in any one of these myriad creatures would generate a moral code WILDLY different from anything we can conveive of.

To argue that our morality represents some manner of Universal morality and that said morality must of necessity come from some Creator God is patently ridiculous. More ridiculous is the idea that the Abrahamaic God actually follows the morality that he allegedly lays out for us. The God of Abraham explicitly endorses slavery, spells out how to buy slaves, how to beat them, when to beat them. The God of Abraham actively endorses genocide, draconian punishments for minor infractions that our society does not even deem criminal, actively endorses warfare, misogyny, homophobia and a host of other ills that modern humans instinctively find repellent. Worst of all, the supposedly loving, forgiving God of Abraham is unwilling to forgive humans from eternal damnation and has CHOSEN to condemn them to eternal torment for a few decades worth of insufficient love. How is it that WE, mere humans, are better at following our own morality than the God of Abraham?

Far from our morality reflecting some revelation of a transcendent divine morality that governs the entire Universe, this allegedly transcendent divine morality is merely an idealization of preexisting human morality. Indeed, the ongoing development of human morality can be clearly seen as the supposedly eternal and unchanging nature of God undergoes a startling metamorphosis from angry tyrannical brutal psychopath in the Old Testament to the warmer, fuzzier, care bear in the New Testament. What changed? We did. Humanity did. We evolved.

Indeed, the sacred scrolls of the world's hundreds of discarded religions and the handful of active ones do not contain the secrets of the Universe or any information whatsoever about transcendent moral truths as revealed by invisible aliens or space kings. Instead, these sacred scrolls are ourattempts to understand ourselves - reflections of who and what we are as a people. Reflections of what we believe.

Atheists merely want to take this one step further. To free ourselves from the need to justify our moral lives based on a world that no longer exists - to update our morality to reflect the world that IS rather than be fettered forever to what was. Secular morality is just as moral, just as egalitarian, just as dedicated to personal freedom, political freedom, peace and human rights as any theistic morality - indeed, those nations that are moving towards secular morality are the most generous, free, peaceful and crime free places on Earth. Which is why it is so hilarious that so many seem to believe that atheists want nothing more than to ban religion, persecute believers and destory morality.

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Meaning Without God is an ongoing project to give voice to those who seek to experience this marvelous world not through the prism of bronze age fairy tales and ancient superstitions, but through the light of reason and the gift of understanding. To give comfort to those who question the value of their existence and who struggle to find meaning in the midst of life's chaos. To give purpose and hope to those who believe in the grace, nobility and beauty of the human spirit.